NBC’s ‘Community’ season 4: Joel McHale explains Chevy Chase exit

For much of the past season and a half, Joel McHale has been very diplomatic when discussing some of the controversy surrounding “Community” and Chevy Chase, often dodging questions about his fight with series creator Dan Harmon while telling some assorted jokes about his age.

However, all this changed courtesy of the actor / comedian’s appearance on “The Howard Stern Show” this week. Stern of course asked McHale about the exit of Chase from the show late last year, and he went on to explain the reasoning behind the move in simple terms: Chase simply “didn’t want to be there.” Just how bad did it get? Whenever McHale tried to reason with Chevy, he explained that the legendary actor “would just try to fight me. He physically wanted to fight me.”

As for the famous “n-word” controversy that came up on the set this past full, McHale confirmed that Chase did in fact drop the racial slur while trying to prove a point about his character. From there, Chase also supposedly told a bizarre anecdote about Richard Pryor supposedly giving him permission to call him that word. Ultimately, this was a very bizarre situation, and we will never fully understand why Chase chose to cause so much trouble on one of the most-beloved comedies on all of network TV … especially when it was received better by critics than the vast majority of Chevy’s films over the course of his career.